Q. How did you avoid the chaos and the carnage?
ALEX BOWMAN: Yeah, I think there was a couple good restarts from the outside the beginning of the second half of the race when we had a restart every half a lap. That helped us. I think we went from eighth to second there pretty quickly. Obviously that was a big gain for us, and then just kind of got put back a little bit. I had one bad restart from the outside of the front row, and that hurt our finishing position.
But yeah, really good race car, and those couple restarts kind of got us out of the mess.
Q. Following up, how was the first race with Blake?
ALEX BOWMAN: Yeah, I think it went pretty well. We struggled here last year; didn't have a good weekend. I was nervous a little bit and didn't know what to expect.
Yesterday went really well; today went pretty well.
Definitely when you come out of here with a fourth, kind of bummed about it. It's a good weekend. Yeah, I think the whole team is working really well together, and Blake is fitting in really, really well.
Q. What did you think of this year's event versus compared to last year in terms of the overall scope of it?
ALEX BOWMAN: It's pretty cool to be in it this year instead of on the way to the airport.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great event. It's a great atmosphere. It's tough when it takes 45 minutes to make like six laps or whatever that was. That was pretty bad when we were just crashing and crashing and crashing.
But I feel like last year's feature was a little bit cleaner than this year's for whatever reason, but yeah, I think it's a great event, and cool to be part of it.
Q. What was the reason for the rash of cautions in your opinion? Last year was cleaner but this year there was an abundance of yellows.
ALEX BOWMAN: Yeah, fortunately we were in front of it, so I don't know. Guys running over each other is probably the answer you're looking for, though. I just don't know who to tell you.
Q. At what point does it become obvious that everybody is just going to run into each other for the entire night? How early in the race does that become obvious to you?
ALEX BOWMAN: When they build a racetrack in a football field. That's what we're here to do. We're here to put on a show and be exciting. Maybe it got a little out of hand at times there with how rough it got, but yeah, we all knew when we heard about this event, whenever it was the first time that we were going to come here, people were going to run over each other. It's too easy.
It's funny, I don't know if guys are just okay with it, or if that carries over to the rest of the season or people forget about it or if that's situational. But yeah, I tried to race super clean. I don't feel like we used anybody up. Really nobody used us up.
Glad I don't have -- I don't feel like I'm on anybody's list, and I don't have a list leaving here.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports